The current idea is that we're going to build the whole component as open source, with the caveat that I can't take external contributions to the parts that we want to ship in-box in Windows. Past that, the plugins, tests, and everything else I can take external code for.

C++11 includes a ton of awesome stuff in the standard library (including how to handle threads, regex, futures, and a whole lot more)... but it's so much different from what I was used to, it's like a whole new language.

I think we're gonna have to take a few deps on Linux regardless (I'm pretty sure that some of Casablanca's code requires Boost, libssl, and libxml++ ... but I don't see what they're using libxml++ for .

So your reasoning is that since it has to ship without deps, you have to write it yourself -> you want to write utf-16 because it's easier and has native support -> everything that's not Windows will therefore also use utf-16